


No Options, All Good

by Emelye



Category: Few Options (2011)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27750601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emelye/pseuds/Emelye
Summary: The Sheendom demanded Florist fanfic. I did my best to deliver.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	No Options, All Good

He was inventorying the cooler when the shopbell rang. Six dozen red roses. Four dozen yellow roses. Two dozen orange roses. Four dozen white roses. One dozen lavender, which never sold and he strongly doubted ever would. His father always insisted on ordering them. 

They always ended up gracing the living room table by week’s end, strangely incongruous with the burnt orange and avocado decor of the apartment which hadn’t been touched since his mom died.

He could hear his father’s thunderous snoring over even the ear shattering decibel of whatever show he’d fallen asleep watching. He would not be attending to customers, it seemed.

“Just a minute!” he called, head buried between the leatherleaf and baby’s breath. He removed a flask from his hip pocket and took a drink before quickly screwing the cap back on and tucking it away again.

The bell rang again. He glanced at his watch. Likely only the mail, then.

He backed out of the cooler and straightened, wiping his palms on his pant legs before checking the counter. 

There was the usual stack of bills. He took a longer pull from his flask as he sorted them, then pulled a white envelope from the pile and carefully tucked it away before gathering the rest and following the sounds of sleep apnea and car chases to his dad’s recliner.

“Dad. DAD.” His father startled awake, all the groans and noises of approaching old age in full effect. “Mail, dad.”

“What’s that? Oh, mail. Did we win the lottery?”

“Not yet, dad.”

“Oh well, maybe tomorrow, eh?”

His smile didn’t reach his eyes. It was an old routine. “Maybe, dad. Have...have you given any more thought to what I said? About the shop?”

“I just don’t see it—”

“But dad, we’d make back the investment with the new business, you have to see—”

“Invest with what money? We’re barely keeping the lights on as it is!”

“You know there are options. Loans—”

He laughed darkly. “We can’t afford the mortgage on the shop as it is, how on earth do you suggest we afford a second one?”

His heart pounded, his hands ached to reach for his flask. _Not at work_ , he’d said, once. Then, _not during business hours_ , which shortly became, _just don’t let dad see_. It was fine. He was _fine_. It was just to get him through. 

“You know this isn’t what we agreed on, dad. When I went back to school, you said you’d support me bringing in new business. Different business. I’m _good_ at what I do, dad, you said it yourself!”

“You are! I’ve never said anything else. But this neighborhood has changed. The industry has changed. Without your mother here, we just can’t do the volume we used to do. I’m sorry, son. I wish I could take that kind of risk, but it would be everything we have, and I can’t lose this place. Not after—”

“I know. I know, dad. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry for wanting more. God knows I want it for you too. Look, it’s almost wedding season. We can put a few more ads in the papers, maybe the local bridal rag. If you want to do some designs for the floor, I’m sure we can get Tommy in to take pictures—”

“Sure, dad. Let’s do it.”

“Don’t give up, son. Please.”

He nodded. Discussion ended. 

He’d been in his last year of college when his mom got cancer. It was slow, painful, and the treatments that never worked ate the entirety of his parents life savings.

He’d moved back home to help in the shop, help his dad, help any way he could. In the end, it hadn’t done much good. He’d stayed on after the funeral, helping his dad. College could wait, he figured. The money was a disaster and his dad was in no shape to open the shop. 

He’d worked in the shop since he was a kid, of course, knew the arrangements backwards and forwards, the care of the flowers and plants, the worn Rollodex of loyal customers growing ever thinner year by year as businesses closed and people died and no new customers came to replace them.

The first smile he’d seen on his dad’s face after his mom died was the day he’d been clearing out the old inventory to prepare for the morning’s shipment and had taken some wire from the back and a bunch of floral foam and built a giant hat out of alstroemeria and poms. His dad walked in and caught him. His response had been to put the hat on.

He hadn’t laughed that hard in a long time. It had also led to the conversation about his returning to school.

He’d finished his degree. Then he’d done his masters. He studied botany and floral design. He’d made sculptures out of flowers, towering masterpieces of orchids and lilies. He’d made gowns of gardenias and arches of azaleas. He’d discovered the subtle beauty of heritage breeds of roses. He had so many ideas for what he’d like to do to expand the shop. A greenhouse of his own, for one, to grow his own supply of flowers that were difficult to source so he could create new arrangements and designs to attract a more sophisticated clientele. 

But there was no money for improvements. His school loans took most of his pay, and little by little, he began to drink the rest. He’d never really been a big drinker, was the thing. But he needed something. The hours were long, he had no time to make friends and at some point after coming back home he’d forgotten how to sleep. 

He knew he had a problem but he thought if he could just get something going, he wouldn’t need it anymore. If he didn’t have to _worry_ so much, it would be fine. 

_That’s not really how these things work_ , he thought, as he fished for his registration in his glove compartment, the strobing red and blue lights in his rearview mirror telling him things were about to get much, much worse.

The suspension he’d expected. It was his third DUI that year. At the rate he was going, permanent revocation wasn’t out of the question. The community service had been a bit of a surprise, though.

 _Please don’t let it be a youth hockey team_ , he thought direly as they handed him the terms of his community service.

It wasn’t. 

The community garden was located on a sad, vacant lot in a highly questionable part of town and was filled with a lot of people with sad, vacant expressions waiting for instructions. The instructions were as follows:

Turn over the dirt.

Water the dirt.

Plant the seeds in the seed packets we hand you.

Water the seeds.

Do it again tomorrow in the next patch of dirt over.

“You like flowers, right?” 

He’d been contemplating the seed packet in his hand. “Hmm? Oh, yeah, I suppose so.”

“These are pretty.” 

She was a tall woman, broad, and her face had a few miles on it that spoke to the sort of lifestyle that brought her here. She had kind eyes. 

“Oh, those are cosmos. Yeah, those are pretty,” he agreed. 

He planted his rows of cornflowers in the dirt. “Oh, wait, not so deep,” he told her. She was digging her row with abandon. Unfortunately there was no way anything would seed that far down. Not that he expected much from this soil. “Fill it back in a little. You don’t want them down too far.”

“Thanks,” she said. “You’re good at this.”

There wasn’t much to say to that. 

That night he thought about those rows when he couldn’t sleep. He reached for his flask but stopped himself and reached for his phone instead. 

_Can you get me some Gaillardia by tomorrow morning?_

A few moments later it buzzed in reply. 

_You know I can._

_I need seeds, not cut_ , he typed.

_Even easier. You need anything else? Sunflowers? Sedum? I got a couple lenten roses sitting around here if you’re working with bad dirt_

There was a box of empty bottles by the door and the one left on the table was nearly empty. There was a case already waiting for him at the liquor store.

Oh, god, what was he doing.

_Bring them all._

He arrived at the garden early. His dad didn’t say much on the drive there, but the sight of the plants in the back of the car made for a slightly less hostile ride.

He hated disappointing his father. Almost as much as he hated lying to him. He’d managed to intercept the white envelope yesterday when he got home, but he didn’t expect he’d be able to manage it for three months solid. Eventually, he’d see it, and then…

“I’m proud of you, you know.”

That was the last thing he expected to hear. 

“I know it hasn’t been easy on you, but, it looks like you’re putting in an effort here.”

He looked back at his father and shrugged. “The soil is poor. I didn’t want to waste the next three months planting zinnias that would never grow.”

“Everyone else on board with this plan?”

He shrugged. “I suppose we’ll see. 

They were. The supervisor made a note in his file. Good behavior, or whatever it was when people showed up for community service with two hundred dollars worth of wholesale seeds and plants. “You going to show them what to do with all this?”

“If that’s all right?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s fine. Go beautify the neighborhood.”

She was there again today. He didn’t know what kind of sentence she was serving but she wasn’t a one-and-done clearly. “You brought your own flowers?”

“I brought enough for everyone,” he added, addressing the rest of the group. “The dirt needs fertilizing. There’s a few bags over there, we can spread around. The flowers they gave us won’t do well without it, and the ones I brought shouldn’t need it. Plant the seeds about four inches down, the plants can go down about eight and if you get to the roses, come find me, I’ll help you get them in.”

“Where’d you get these?” asked one of the men.

He shrugged. “I’m a florist.”

There were a few snickers from the back. He ignored them as usual and got to work on planting the roses.

Two weeks later the lot was starting to bloom. 

“I just want you to know, I got a plant. A little spider plant, like you told me. And I’m done today, but I really appreciate what you did here,” she said.

He looked up at her. “I didn’t do that much.”

“You did though. You did. Maybe you can’t see it, but this didn’t feel like no community service I ever did before. Felt like I was actually doing something, you know? Anyway, you’re good at this.”

“I’m a florist,” he said.

“Yeah, that stuff too,” she said, and got into the ride waiting for her.

The next day the supervisor pulled him aside. “Judge has offered to waive the rest of your service if you want my job. It’s not much but I figure it’s better than doing the same shit for three months and not getting paid for it.”

He was stunned. “Is it hard?”

“It look hard?”

He didn’t answer that, but he did take the job. 

His dad never got a single envelope. He’d stopped drinking somehow. It wasn’t hard to ignore his hands shaking when they were in the dirt. That was the first thing he noticed, and the nausea wasn’t as bad outside. The other thing was that the people who showed up at the lots with their court orders seemed to think he was someone worth listening to, which was a new feeling when you’d gone your whole life introducing yourself as a florist.

His paychecks weren’t much, but he was close, very close, to being able to pay down his loans. When a couple of the guys at the lot asked if he taught anywhere, he didn’t know what to say. 

“If you wanted to, I’d give you a couple hundred bucks to show me how to grow this stuff. You can always get jobs on lawn crews, even if you have a record.”

He hadn’t thought about that. 

They came by the shop on Saturdays from three to four. He set up a table in the back. Sometimes his dad came and watched. He didn’t call them classes. He didn’t really think of them that way. It made him think of bored and wealthy people trying to fill time learning to grow orchids. This was more like job training.

They told their friends, though. And soon he was teaching most nights, classes of up to twenty people, mostly ex-cons, how to prune and fertilize roses. 

He didn’t know when exactly he became happy, but he remembered when his dad commented on it.

He had a white envelope in his hand. 

“I paid it off, son.”

He felt like his heart stopped. He couldn’t breathe. “I’m...I’m…”

“I know. I know what you did. I know why you did it and I know what happened to the money. I know you.”

“I...I thought I could surprise you. I thought it would be enough, I wanted so badly to show you I could make something of my own, build something…”

“I know you did, son. I told you I was proud of you. You didn’t have to do any of that.”

“I never wanted to be just a florist, dad, I’m sorry.”

“You’ve never been just a florist. Never.”

“I went behind your back, and I mortgaged the shop…”

“I know. I knew you did from the first. You didn’t think I’d find out? The shop is still in my name. The bank called me. I told them to go ahead.”

“Why?”

“I was furious. But I also thought maybe you wanted it so badly you could make it work.”

“But I didn’t.”

“But you _did_. Look at what you’ve done! Your classes are bringing in new business every day. You’re a great teacher, son. Look at all the people you’re helping. Your mother would be so _proud_ of you.”

It was a bit embarrassing to cry in front of his dad, but he thought maybe his dad was crying too, so he tried not to worry about it when his dad hugged him.

“I’m building you a greenhouse,” he said. “The new loan will cover it. Get yourself a new bowtie. I know you’re good for it, son. Teach your jailbirds how to grow orchids.”

He laughed.

The greenhouse _was_ a success, as were the classes he added to fill the new space. Some time later, a young man joined his class for ex-cons who seemed vaguely familiar.

“You sold me roses a few years ago.”

“Oh yes, so I did.”

“Kind of wish this class had been around when I first got out back then.”

He nodded. He’d heard similar things from many of the people in his classes. “You doing all right now though?”

The man nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I am.”

“Good,” he said. 

“Me too.”


End file.
